


In Garruk's Wake

by GoblinElectromancer



Category: Magic: The Gathering (Card Game)
Genre: Actual Elk Biology, Chill Erotica, Fiveplay, Help It Got Sexy, I Will Go Down With This Ship, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Interspecies Romance, M/M, My First AO3 Post, My First Work in This Fandom, Plot With A Side Of Hot, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Someone Call The Gatewatch, The Pairing You Never Knew You Needed, This Is Not Going To Go The Way You Think
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-03-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:02:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23258863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoblinElectromancer/pseuds/GoblinElectromancer
Summary: Garruk is freed from the bonds of his curse, and Oko is all out of things to meddle in. Brace yourself for the softest, most canonical version of this pairing you've ever read.
Relationships: Oko/Garruk Wildspeaker
Comments: 5
Kudos: 10





	In Garruk's Wake

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ViciousInnocence](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViciousInnocence/gifts).



> DISCLAIMER: the characters and setting portrayed here belong to Wizards of the Coast. This is fan created work for fans, and I claim no rights to Wizards' intellectual property.
> 
> I am so excited to post my first fic here for ViciousInnocence! Like...my first fic on Ao3 at all, and first fic since 2006! I had a really fun (and challenging) time getting these two dudes to fkk somewhat canonically. Enjoy the ride! Let me know how I did!
> 
> In Garruk's Wake + Return of The Wildspeaker inspired this fic.

Oko did not tire the way other beings did. He could run with more endurance than a wolf could, and refresh its exhausted form for another, and another…for all of time, it sometimes seemed. Still, a fortnight’s journey on Garruk’s trail had worn him down.

As he crested the twisting root of a massive arbor guardian, his exhausted wolf’s body disappeared. He didn’t bother shaping his birth form into another wolf. This last sprint through the great arbor had exhausted him, and he was ready to rest in a more stationary body.

He looked ahead, following the dark scars in the earth and the ravaged boughs of trees. Oko knew a curse when he saw one – and Garruk’s curse had certainly left its mark. 

Human footfalls swished in the brush. Time to change, he thought. He coaxed his tired limbs into twisted branches, his hair into hanging moss, his legs into knotty, pulsating roots. He didn’t take time to really settle into his form, as Garruk was growing close. With his last moment of eyesight Oko could see the green aura of his druidic mana.

Oko’s senses plunged into the bizzarely far-reaching pulses of an arbor guardian’s roots. He heard Garruk’s feet nearby, and tensed his woody fibers to bring a root crashing into Garruk’s meaty side.

“Halt,” he called through his rustling leaves. “No humans enter here.”

Garruk grunted. Through tree-sense Oko caught the mana clearing from Garruk’s eyes, and a shift in posture that he’d come to understand meant he was coming out of the throes of a druid’s trance. 

“I’m more beast than man,” Garruk responded. “And I’ve been here once already. You didn’t stop me then.”

“I must have been asleep,” Oko quipped. He bet that, being new to Eldraine and mad for most of his stay, Garruk didn’t know the arbor guardians were sleepless beings. “Had I been awake then, I would have squeezed the life from you.”

Oko wrapped a pulsing root around Garruk’s middle. He squeezed – just a playful squish, really – to which Garruk’s flesh responded with iron resistance. 

“Oh my you’re strong,” Oko’s leaves rattled. He’d forgotten this form had no barrier between speech and thought. “Damn.”

“Let go. I’m not going to harm your grove. I’m here to cleanse—“

“Why bother healing the damage you’ve done?” Oko thundered, tightening his grip, thrilling at the control his powerful tree form could exert on this giantlike man.

“I was purified, the curse—“ Garruk tightened his hand around Oko’s root. A surge of green mana flooded from his palm, and Oko found his mind filled with the fabled primal mind-speak of druids. He shared Garruk’s senses as the curse bled out of him, riding Garruk’s joy as his druidic gifts shook free. 

He then felt Garruk’s sadness as he saw the creatures mangled in his wake, still touched by the curse he’d passed to them. Shocked, Oko loosened his grip on Garruk’s gut and thighs. To his dismay, Garruk’s sweat-slicked body slipped through his coiled roots. The druid righted himself, then boldly strode away.

“Damn,” rustled Oko. Suddenly his branches chafed and he became tired of juggling so many extra limbs. He stayed in his tense form until Garruk had gone beyond the reach of his sensory roots. He stayed longer still, to rule out the possibility that he was still within eyeshot. 

After grueling minutes Oko melted back to the beautiful body that easily bewitched the folk of Eldraine. He sat for a moment in the soft moss that had caressed his roots. _A fortnight is too long to be following this shambling demigiant,_ he thought. _I should quit this. Leave Eldraine. I gain nothing by staying here._

_He gains nothing, either. He could leave, just like me. But he stays to heal the trees and beasts? Because a cauldron called him noble? Stupid dog._

A flicker at the back of Oko’s mind said _you’re wrong. He doesn’t do it for nobility or any other blasted virtue. He does it because the curse is a scar upon the Wilds. That…is the only reason._

Imagine having only one reason to do something! Imagine no mischief to sow or minds to ensnare, or chaos to unleash – by the stars, this man had to have some other motive. He could not merely be healing a scar he’d made.

No human was so compassionate as that.

Perhaps he was just simple. Stupid.

_Ah, no, but you’ve touched his mind. Even cursed, he was not stupid. He had beautiful thoughts contained within that blighted muck…oh Oko. You are a gibbering idiot. Forget the dog Garruk and this entire blasted world. They do not serve you anymore._

Good. That settled it. Find another ho---

He stopped himself before he could finish the word. 

_You do not need a home. You will never have a home, that is a false word created by tyrants. Home makes idiots of all free creatures. Eldraine is not your home._

That settled it.

Oko reached for his spark. He held it in his mental grasp, seeking the pathway to the blind eternities. Hovering, but not making the jump. 

Maddeningly, he couldn’t leave. In his years of wandering no world had welcomed him like Eldraine had. No world had been so wild and free – blast, even its humans valued the wilds, and knew better than to venture to conquer them. And there were so many fae here, so many of his own kind unchained by the tyranny he’d faced in childhood. So much unsuppressed magic and desire and---

_Drat. I really don’t want to leave. I really do want to know Garruk now that he’s healed. How stupid of me._

Oko stood, feeling dizzy. He noticed the glowing green trail of Garruk’s power hadn’t faded, and hated that he felt relieved to see it. _Damn all the stars. I’m home._

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Garruk remembered how hunger had felt before the curse. He’d thought, in his druid’s beginnings, that hungry creatures were angry. His old hunger had always come with anger.

Hunger during the curse had been anger and torture.

Hunger now was welcome. He accepted his hunger as triggering the need to hunt. It made him happy, thinking of hunting again. He’d be hunting at its purest. Not for anger, or for power. Simply to eat.

Unfortunately, he hadn’t found much to hunt since he’d started following his cursed path. Only deranged animals and warped plants. After freeing the animals, he couldn’t bring himself to end their lives… so he was very hungry. 

Uncursed berries here and there made meager meals. Soon he’d have to stop to care for his body with a real meal. Soon…but there was always more disaster on the trail. Always, constantly more to heal. He couldn’t stop yet.

Since leaving the strangling tree he’d picked up the scent of a cursed creature. He remembered this one. Its musky smell raised blurry memories of their first contact, and of its howling as his curse infected its mind. He’d doomed so many minds to suffer alongside his. So sad.

Garruk had discovered he couldn’t beat his sadness with anger anymore. It had been easy to do as a young druid, easy before the curse. Now his anger just wouldn’t come. Now…it seemed he should only seek rage if it were truly needed to survive.

As he caught another whiff of the musky smell, his greif bloomed. He hadn’t even asked the creature its name. He didn’t know what its kind called themselves. He’d only blindly commanded its instincts, bending its nature to become his, taking its raw hunter’s power for his own.

That wasn’t right.

His former self may have claimed no right and wrong existed in the game of survival. He had believed then that only the ruthless, only the strong reaped the bounty of nature. That, too, had never been right.

He should have asked this creature if they could come together as packmates, or, if it were solitary, as a denmate for a time until their bond was no longer needed. Garruk should have asked to join its hunt, not forced it to join his.

Ahead, the residue of his curse hung in sloppy ropes from shredded trees. The stink became an inescapable odor. More memory surfaced – in his time bonded with this creature, he’d learned this was its home. He braced himself for a rush of claws as he stepped into the corrosive, sickly blackness of its den.

His green mana, channeled from this boundless wild world, feathered into the air and brush around him. It took hard work to chew away at the sloplike black musk left by the tainted beast. 

Why hadn’t it shown itself yet? He was here in its den presenting a clear challenge…ah. No. These creatures would sooner abandon a den than defend one. They didn’t bother squatters. They only bothered invaders.

Another embedded memory surfaced. 

They used their musky urine to mark territory. 

Well then, Garruk would use his own scent to claim this particular turf.

He left his human mark on the creature’s bed. A challenging snarl rose from the brush, then a tail of prickly spines. Garruk held his ground.

The striped back of the creature rushed him. He dodged its horns, but its spike-furred tail caught him in the ribs and he fell into its musk-coated bed. 

No time to see if he’d been punctured through. Its wolverine-like forepaws swiped to gouge him, raking more gashes in his battered armor. Between swipes he grabbed a fistful of its soft neck fur and, just as it tried to eviscerate him with its hind claws, his mana flowed into its flesh.

Garruk found the corroded regions of the creature’s mind. He heard the curse whispering at him, beckoning him to succumb. He would not. He tore through the mire to free the creature’s memory. Its age came forward first – it had lived tenfold human lifetimes. It’d had many hunts and broods and had survived a hundred Locthwain arrows. 

His mana fizzled into the pulsating, cursed veins binding its mind. By the pure power of nature, the veins withered, and Garruk and the creature shared a cleansed breath.

Garruk pulled away from its mind and released his grip on its neck. In their last bonded moment, he felt its panic at the strange smells – it didn’t recognize its own tainted scent smeared all over the trees and brush. It bucked away from him, kicking up leaves and cursed musk as it bounded to freedom.

Garruk backed out of the muck, shaking as he stood. He pushed himself to thread out still more mana, wreathing the den in green licks of flame until all trace of the curse had cleared. He came down from the druid’s trance and collapsed onto a mossy rock.  
Still hungry. Damn.

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

All that time inside a predator’s mind had left Garruk totally cured of the urge to hunt. He gathered armfuls of mushrooms, cresses, nuts, and berries instead, learning from druid-speak that they were all safe to eat. 

He’d never taken time to speak to plants as a young druid, exalting only the hunt. Made him wonder what kind of tasty forage he’d missed on his home plane while swimming in his immature aggression.

He leaned out of the pool he’d been soaking in to strike a nut open with a sharpened rock. The stone fae did it this way. Just minutes ago one had given him a giant version of her own special cracker after watching him struggle. “Large man is so annoying. He can’t even crack his own nut,” she’d jabbed, then flitted away.

Garruk savored the crisp nut, the cool water shared by snakes and aquaspiders, and the feeling of being in his bare skin in the company of only wild beings.

The cresses tasted sweet and green. This was much better than gorging on raw meat with the agony of the veil curse pumping through him. Much, much better than living on the verge of becoming a demon.

It would be stupidly human of him to fear losing his humanity. Still…he did.

He relaxed against a slick rock to watch short-furred goats wade into the other end of the pool. A breeze rustled the lily flowers nestled around him. One flower glowed and its petals fell away, revealing the form of a very small bipedal being made of swirling orange firefly lights. The lights faded, and the being solidified into a bluish-skinned fae with matted black hair. He wore no clothing, and he looked like some large-fisted knight had wrung him and then left him to drown.

“Garruk. Can I join you?” asked the fae.

Garruk knew that voice. He stood abruptly, dousing what must be Oko in the wave of water flowing off his body. Garruk prepared to walk himself very far away. He wreathed his mind in brambles of green mana—

“Oh, please don’t go into a trance and run away. I’m asking kindly, and see?” He spread his arms and a pair of crooked black dragonfly’s wings. “I’ve made myself very vulnerable, showing you my birth form.” With a defeated sigh, Oko hunched onto a knee and plopped his chin in his hand. 

Garruk slowed his descent into trance to stare at the battered, tiny fae. 

“Yes, this is what I truly look like, my gigantic friend. You may stare at me and pity me all you want. Just don’t smash me to bits with those great hammerhands of yours. It would be a shame to do that to someone who genuinely wants your company.”

Garruk frowned and folded his arms. He sank back into the water, stretching his druid’s senses to a hawk perched high above the pool. _Friend, there’s good meat here. A morsel of fae flesh to make you strong. If he’s cruel to me, will you peck out his eyes?_

The hawk answered with an agreeable flick of her tail. Through their bond, Garruk learned she didn’t often taste fae meat. She liked it. 

Garruk faced Oko more comfortably now. He didn’t want to waste words on Oko, but he found himself saying “is that all you want?”

“Yes,” Oko answered, pushing a lilypad around with a clawed finger. “I’m lonely. Mine is a sad existence, even when I’m beautiful.” He dropped further into the water, gazing at Garruk with bloodshot orange eyes. “What do you find beautiful, Garruk?”

“A newborn bear cub. A budding leaf. Bloodied snow after a wolf’s first winter kill.”

“Hmm…I could be any of those things. Would you find me beautiful then? Would you let me travel with you?”

Garruk’s brow furrowed. “I don’t need my travel companion to use artifice to please me. Maybe another man would want that. I would not.”

Oko blinked. “Then…would it please you to have me along, merely as myself?”

Would it? Garruk felt his own isolation and loneliness gurgle forward. He had forsworn society and civilization – he had vowed to never act human again – but he still craved a companion. It had come to him, many times on his journey of cleansing, that his old path of loneliness had been his worst crime against nature. 

“I’ve always traveled alone,” he told Oko. “So I don’t know if a companion would please me. I don’t know if I could trust the one who made me his slave, or if you could trust the one who hunted you.”

“It’s a dark spiral,” Oko laughed. “That’s why I like it. That’s why I like you. A great, strong giant who’s more beast than man.” Oko lifted his chin from the water. “I liked you when you were cursed and I like you even better now. You’re the only human I may ever like, Garruk. You should be honored.”

“So man has wronged you too.”

“Oh, has he ever. Man and my own kind…and all the world it sometimes seems. But then there’s this man going around trying to make something right. He’s greenifying all the cursed places he left in the forest and being so well intentioned it’s making me sick. I have to know – why is he doing it?”

“Many creatures have asked me this—“

“I know, I was all of them. The arbor guardian, the shadow sprinter, the selkie – and on and on. Each time I blocked your path you gave me the same damnable answer.”

“My answer hasn’t changed.”

Oko laughed. “You leave me no choice, I must believe you truly care for the wilds. You are in fact a compassionate, pensive soul when not raging accursed.” He flicked a spray of water into Garruk’s face. “Can I have some of your mushrooms?”

Garruk wondered if there were a way to make his good humor show on his face. As beads of pond water bled down his cheek, he felt it warm. He gestured to his stockpile of food, and Oko hungrily descended on it.

“Oh, mmm, oh this is good! This is so, so delicious. Oh stars, how tasty—“ As Oko devoured the last handful of berries, a content, sharp-toothed grin split his face. “No being on Eldraine has ever shared his food with me! Oko will steal and conjure his meals no more, all thanks to Garruk!” he patted his stomach, then leaned into a patch of sunlight. His dagger-toothed smile made Garruk warm again. 

Garruk felt his mouth split uncontrollably. When the wave of warmth passed, he rubbed his jaw. How strange it was to smile. Any self respecting animal would only bare teeth as a sign of aggression.

“You can travel with me,” he said. “But no tricks.”

Garruk rose from the pool, reaching out for the hawk’s mind as he stood. _Friend, this fae is bad for eating,_ he told her. Then he dissolved their bond, hiding the green glow in his eyes by turning his back to Oko. He shook the water from his body, then strode for his furs and armor.

A splish and Oko’s “wait,” made him turn to see the fae step from the pool. “You barely rested. Can your life really be all survival and seriousness?”

Garruk didn’t answer. He faced his armor, put a hand on it. The sun felt so soothing on his bare skin. His belly so full and content. The pain of the curse hovered at the very edge of his senses.

Orange light falling on his hand made him turn around again – this time to see Oko disintegrate into swarming fireflies. He took the shape of a young elk, trotting gently to Garruk and nudging him with his horns. “Wha—“

Oko raked a hoof in the dirt. "Touch me. Let’s run together, it’ll be such a time!” 

Oko’s mental call softened Garruk’s resolve. Could he trust—

Elk Oko nudged him again. Garruk gingerly touched his warm, ridgy horns. “Alright trickster. Show me your trick.”

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Oko braced for the sensation of his spell stretching thin over another living body. He flashed through hundreds of tricksy scenarios – turning Garruk into a duck and bounding away. Making him a frog, a flea, a permanent dog friend – ah, no. Those plots would not suit him. He wanted to run with Garruk and revel in the wild, unbridled joy of summer’s end. He gave elk form to Garruk, then stood back to witness his beautiful work.

Garruk, a huge specimen of elkdom with many-pronged horns, pranced and brayed. Green mana bloomed where his cleft hooves touched ground. 

“Can we run?” he brayed.

Oko submitted to a playful need to use his strong legs. No doubt Garruk, being more connected to wild things, felt his elk body all the more vigorously. As they ran Oko’s spell caught empathetic traces of Garruk’s emotions. He felt Garruk’s sense of freedom, connection, and joy at experiencing the form of a kindred creature. 

Oko could keep this form for years if he wanted, and trap Garruk along with him. He could lead them both into a captive Locthwain elk herd…and sow all the females with fae and druidic seed. How funny it would be to watch the looks on the herder’s faces! Imagine the fables, the tales for centuries to come of the eldritch brood of man-elk and elk-fae.

Were there a Locthwain herd to be found, he would have done it. For now, Oko found solace in blindly being in the world, rather than meddling with it. 

He let Garruk set their pace across fallen trees and tranquil meadows. As noon approached and the day grew hot, Garruk’s sweating neck angled for water flowing from a crystalline stream. He nipped Oko’s ear mid-drink. “Want to spar?”

Deep within Oko’s elk form, in a realm of mana he did not touch, the animal’s instinct responded to Garruk’s challenge. “Yes,” Oko blurted. 

Garruk tossed his horns and shook his proud, thick neck fur. “This time of year, males are bulking their horns, and their skeltons are frail. If we’re not careful, this could get brutal. We should spar like playing bucks, not like mating bulls.”

“What’s so special about this time of year?”

“Breeding season,” Garruk snorted.

Oh. No. He revisited his earlier plot and understood that the instincts of this form…and any form…must have more sway over him than he’d realized. Mid-thought, Garruk’s empathetic energy notified him he should get ready to lock horns.

Garruk hit Oko like a celestial hammer – but the strong muscles of Oko’s neck absorbed the impact. In a secret corner of his mind Oko admitted to being lost in Garruk’s wild energy. He celebrated the experience of being alive and connected with the cycles of nature. 

Thoughts of manipulation and plot left his head entirely. He charged at Garruk’s antlers – CRASH! The sound blasted throught the trees. It was a blessed ringing in Oko’s ears.

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Oko’s charge, their antlers locked. Snorting and stamping didn’t get them unhooked. “Struggling will only stick you tighter,” Garruk gritted. His shivering muscles slackened. He inhaled, and wanted his human body. He sank toward Oko’s horns, feeling the pressure as he pushed back.

Garruk let his consciousness descend close to druidic trance. He wanted this bond. His rushing blood slowed to a drowsy pulse. His elk skin ached to be human again. 

He felt the bridge of Oko’s spell steadily crumble. Though the blue mana spectrum was unknown to Garruk, the energy of Oko’s transformation spell felt similar to that of his wild empathy. Garruk swirled through that shared feeling, and through the feeling of horns dissolving, hands forming from toe bones, and Oko’s face slumping into the soft hollow beneath his ribs. 

“For the love of all green and growing things,” Garruk muttered. Then he sank to his knees. Oko’s arms twined around his neck, and Garruk recalled a tree winding its roots around his waist. He felt soft moss under his knees and the breath of the wilderness on his naked skin. He felt Oko’s breath, too, and his civilized past rushing to castigate him for having this desire.

That civilized shadow of himself wanted to pull away. It told him man did not lay with fae, or lay in the woods, or admit to sudden cravings of the flesh. Garruk allowed Oko’s fingers to erase that last vestige of civility as they brushed through his hair. 

He hadn’t touched a single person since his teenage years, in the time before losing his village and family and turning to the wild ways. He knew this was going to be strange. Thankfully, after all that had happened, he’d learned not to fear strange things. If given the chance to be caressed, and to feel this kind of connection again, he’d take it.

“I can become whatever you want me to be,” Oko breathed into his ear. “A lovely maiden? A shaggy bear?”

“Just you,” Garruk answered. 

Oko squeezed closer, then directed Garruk to straddle him as he lay on his back in a bed of spongy moss. His crooked wings caught the fading sunlight in sprays of purple and blue. “I can’t see why you’d want me like this, though it is liberating.”

Oko’s claws tracked down to Garruk’s thighs, then up to comb the thick hairs of his chest. Oko’s touch made firm knots of his nipples and turned his lapping breath to hot panting. He groped, squeezed, and bounced Garruk’s pecs. “They’re so fun,” he snickered. A deep, grasping kiss made his laughter melt into Garruk’s mouth.

Garruk’s tongue brushed Oko’s sharp teeth. He tasted remnants of wild berries and smelled a piney scent on Oko’s skin. His hair reminded Garruk of soft spring grass, his mouth whispered soft pleading sounds as Garruk roamed his neck and chest. He lurched up, demanding that Garruk stroke the fuzz on his wings, and raked his fingers into Garruk’s scalp when he did. 

He clung to Garruk, jolting him with small nips from his teeth and a firm grip on his haunches. Garruk traced the fuzz on Oko’s shoulderblades and stroked thin wing tissue, careful not to crush them, even when Oko’s firm tongue made him shudder and buck. Eventually he melted into delirious, wild lustfulness. He happily rode Oko’s waves of fervent kissing and biting. 

Garruk figured he must go where the wilds had led him. He searched and he decided, now that Oko had found him, that this bed of moss would mark his true submission to the wild ways.


End file.
